In many conventional database systems, users access their data resources in one logical database, from a user's own systems. Access to a database consumes system resources, as the database system must process and respond to requests as well as accessing storage to read and/or write data. Access to remote databases is much more costly in terms of resource use, given that in addition to the database access described above, there is also network bandwidth consumed. If a user is viewing multiple pages of data from a database, changes to what is being viewed traditionally involve another database request, including accessing the database again. Thus, viewing a lot of data can result in a significant load on the database and/or network systems as multiple requests are made to change views on the data.
Additionally, it has been observed by the inventors that users who want to view a lot of database data typically want to work on classes of things presented in the data. However, traditional database access mechanisms for filtering the data for viewing works on a row or item level, rather than allowing access to classes. Thus, remote access to multiple rows of data for viewing can cause a significant burden on the performance of a database system, with accompanying slow performance from a user perspective.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview is provided below, followed by amore detailed description with reference to the drawings.